I've never read any of Jackie's books before as i'd never fancied them.. This thoughwas a really good read that i couldn't put down.. Still not tried any of her other books though. ( )

I've never read any of Jackie's books before as i'd never fancied them.. This thoughwas a really good read that i couldn't put down.. Still not tried any of her other books though. ( )

I was going to give this book two stars like I normally do for garbage books that never pretend to be anything other than garbage books, but there is a dog in this book named Amy Winehouse because, well, it sounds just like Amy Winehouse. That's apparently how things work, so in solidarity with Jackie Collins, upon witnessing my cat hacking up a hairball on a piece of paper and then trying to fuck it, I've renamed my cat Jackie Collins.

Someday, I'm going to write a book called The Dude With the Plane and the Huge Dick, stick a pen name on the front, and then make 60 million pounds or however much this old hag had when she croaked out. It's all so, so bad. I just don't understand. Maybe other people read it for the same reason I do; each of them has a shitty friend who will only read the intentionally terrible books they're given for Christmas if someone else does it first. Do these people not have a TV? I love reading. I really, really love reading. But you'll get far more out of bad TV than a bad book and it takes like 10% of the time.

But wait, you say! There's sex in this thing! Well, let's examine the text for a good example on how to get a steady diet of sex in your media. Benito, a grumpy young stereotype with a prominent role in this book, decides he wants to get a boner. How does he go about this? Does he pick up a Jackie Collins book and read it until page 264, at which point he could read a paragraph-and-a-half blow job? Actually, he doesn't. Straight to the porn for our hero. See, at first I didn't think there was a lesson to take from this thing, but maybe there is!

And please, PLEASE don't give me the shtick about how Collins' fiction is somehow supposed to depict what Hollywood is actually like. What the fuck is this supposed to be, a parable? Can anyone explain to me what a dude with really nice abs desperately trying to pork a lawyer after getting blown by Madonna says about Los Angeles that isn't already self-evident? "A LIFE OF FAME AND FORTUNE ISN'T WHAT IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE," said Mother Goose in like the 15th century. "OCCASIONALLY, HOT RICH PEOPLE DO SEX STUFF," I believe comes directly from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is all old news. We get it already! How many fucking shiny-eyed rubes do you think we've got left in this country? DON'T ANSWER THAT QUESTION

Also, lest we forget, a lady gets straight up raped right at the beginning of this book, and it's handled with all the sensitivity that such a subject deserves, assuming you, like Jackie Collins, believe that being a rape victim is super similar to eating too much pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. The victim is grumpy for a couple chapters (which are like three pages each in a 400 page book, meaning we're talking one wad of cum in the Arctic Ocean), after which she just gets over it and becomes the "Poor Little Bitch Girl" that we love to hate. Now I'm a man who's completely empty on the inside, and that seems callous and dismissive even to me.

What's fascinating to me is that this isn't the first time I've talked about a situation like this in a terrible book. The way I see it, bad authors, much like good authors, will occasionally write about real world problems that involve interesting complications. What separates the good from the bad is that a good author will both acknowledge and examine the issues, while a bad one will 100% of the time get scared and push it all out of the way as quickly as possible.

In both the James Patterson books I've read, there is a minor character with mental illness that has been failed by both a family and a healthcare system. One is homeless. One is in prison. What can we do to help such people? What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future? Is it our responsibility to get them help, or is it theirs? These are all questions that a good writer could explore through fiction. Instead, Patterson takes the equally commendable route of making fun of them. "LOL that guy thinks he hears voices. Why would anyone want to consider whether his tragic life outcome was necessary?" Fair enough, James.

Jackie Collins, in Poor Little Bitch Girl, has an opportunity to expound on the traumatic experience of a prostitute who has been raped. Who can she talk to about it? Will she feel guilty, even though she shouldn't? Does she have an obligation to report the rapist at the risk of her livelihood in order to keep him from victimizing someone else? It'd be one thing if Jackie had left it to the readers to answer those questions, but she doesn't even make the fucking CHARACTERS answer the questions, which I would have told you was impossible to pull off before I read this book. These are questions that our protagonist MUST answer, because that shit happened to her, but Jackie just kind of lets it all fade away. She didn't even have the courtesy to pull a James Patterson and turn it into a reprehensible joke. Yeah, that's right Jackie. I just called you worse than James Patterson.

Now feel free to tell me that these books are supposed to be light reads that shouldn't be taken too seriously. "Nobody reads Jackie Collins to think too much! Why can't you just let a dumb book be dumb?" Well, motherfucker, I'm not the one that dropped a lady getting raped in my non-serious book. If you don't want to deal with rape, you don't have to write about it! Do you know how many rapes there are in The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Not very many! (And no, the sequel The Very Horny Caterpillar is not canon) Do you know how many rapes there are in Norm Macdonald's autobiography? Two, and they're both hilarious!

That's where you fucked it all up, Jackie. If you really felt like you needed to write about rape without taking it seriously, you needed to write a fake memoir that takes exactly zero things seriously. Your book, as crazy as it sounds, just wasn't absurd enough to get away with it.

Oh well. It is what it is. All this shit is what it is. Happy New Year. ( )

I had never read a Jackie Collins book before and I don't really like jumping into an already established series, but I was loaned this book so thought I'd give it a shot (no pun intended with a shooting in the book).

The story centres around 4 main characters; Bobby, Denver, Annabelle and Carolyn. They all went to same school as youths but weren't all friends. Denver is a lawyer who was briefly friendly with Annabelle, daughter of two famous movie stars, but is now friends with Carolyn, assistant to a senator. Bobby is the son of Lucky Santangelo and is in Annabelle's social circle as he is friends with her boyfriend, Frankie.

Unsurprisingly, Annabelle is a spoilt bitch and is the subject of the book's title. She lands herself in hot water but as it is in LA, if you have enough money you can make anything go away. I quite liked Denver at first, as she seemed the more normal of the 3 girls until she jumped into bed with anyone who looked at her for longer than 10 seconds. Carolyn got the short straw; having an affair with a married senator who makes an arrangement with a local gang leader to abduct Carolyn when she gets too attached. That was quite a gripping part of the story. Bobby didn't really leave a lasting impression on me. He seemed a bit weak, most unlike the playboy I expected him to be.

I really liked the way that Jackie Collins summed it all up in the last chapter by giving a brief 'what happened next' to each character. I do think that there were too many characters in the book with none of them standing head and shoulders above the rest as a main character. The murder storyline was predictable and the bitch wasn't even that bitchy so it all felt a bit flat for me. Perhaps if I had read the first 6 books in the series, I would have enjoyed it more. ( )

As I listen to this I realize I've read it before. This is a good series. ( )